Manzoor is seventy and walks a route nobody in the lane knows is a route: Fatima’s stall, the Agarwals’ shutter, a widow upstairs who needs nothing. Twenty-nine doors, every morning, between two glasses of tea.

Gopal Mehra has inspected 140 carts in Sector 12-East for nine years. A new sub-clause wants each one fifteen centimetres from the wall behind it. In this lane, not one of them can be.

Every morning Fatima pours a second glass of tea, lets it sit for one full boil, and tips it out. She has done it for six years. In eleven years she has never written down what anyone owes her.